18 July 2016

 
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Outlook

  1. A brief introduction to the Better Life Index;

  2. Comparative analysis of the aggregated indicators for well-being over the "OECD" countries;

  3. Focus on (direct) indicators describing the popular "perception": How do they relate with "measured" (indirect) indicators?

  4. Is "perception" adding information to the "big picture"?

The Source

  • The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an intergovernmental economic organisation providing a platform to compare policy experiences and monitoring economic, social and environmental changes;

  • 35 members + 25 non-members (such as China and Brasil) in the committees;

  • For more details on OECD policies, visit http://www.oecd.org.

The "Better Life" Index. How do you measure well-being?

  • The BLI is an interactive web-based tool created to engage people in the debate on well-being and, through this process, learn what matters the most to them.

  • 11 keys calculated from 24 indicators and 38 countries.

  • Living conditions: Housing, Income, Jobs;

  • Quality of life: Community, Education, Environment, Governance, Health, Life satisfaction, Safety and Work-life balance;

  • The Italic keys are (partly) based on public polls. To date, over 100.000 users participated to the initiative.

Aggregated indicators

Aggregated indicators: Life satisfaction

Aggregated indicators: Community

Aggregated indicators: Health

Aggregated indicators: Safety

Comparing Direct and Indirect indicators

A quick look at the normalized density ditribution

Health: Self-reported health + life expectancy

Health: Self-reported health + life expectancy(2)

Safety: Feeling Safe + Homicide rate

Safety: Feeling Safe VS Homicide rate (2)

Correlation matrix for the aggreagated indicators (keys)

  • Life satisfaction shows a good correlation with Jobs and Health;
  • Community does not appear to correlate with any other variable;
  • Safety correlates with Education.

Life satisfaction VS Jobs/Health

Correlation among direct indicators

  • Most direct indicators show a good correlation;
  • This might suggest a bias in the data gather in public polls;
  • People rank their well being in a "local" context.

Conclusions

  • The BLI captures the popular perception of well being in 4 indicators obtained through public opinion polls;
  • The limited number of samples (~200.000 in 2015) and the lack of an appropriate weighting, limits the reliability of the aggregated indicators such as "Safety" and "Health";
  • The dataset contains a number of "outlying" countries i.e. countries with significantly low values for most indicators. As a result, the normalized distributions are skewed towards the high ranking countries ;

Conclusions (2)

  • The density distribution of the 4 direct indicators suggests that a "optimistic" bias;
  • Direct indicators do not seem to correlate well with the indirect indicators, even within the same key.
  • Quality of support network, does not seem to correlate with any indirect indicator.

Q&A

Correlation among non aggregated indicators

Aggregated indicators: Wealth

Aggregated indicators: Housing

Aggregated indicators: Jobs

Aggregated indicators: Education

Aggregated indicators: Environment

Aggregated indicators: Engagement